


Tsar Bomba

by Papapaldi



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, What if Vanya survived the apocalypse she caused and Five found her?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25859719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: The Soviet RDS-220 hydrogen bomb (code name Vanya) was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created.There’s a monster at the end of the world, and a boy who can jump through time. He jumps too far, and finds himself in its lair. The boy picks through the ruins, and wakes the monster up.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 20
Kudos: 179





	Tsar Bomba

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know I have a wip going that's about Five and Vanya but I couldn't get this idea out of my head

The world ends with a symphony. 

The soloist has its audience enraptured; affixed to their seats as the sound rages over their heads. It draws blood from their ears and blackens their eyes. Her ensemble fell silent long ago, graciously allowing the soloist to take the spotlight. And she has become it; a thousand times brighter, and growing in radiance with every sweeping, soaring note. Her family came to watch her, and they have the best seats in the house; suspended before her from tendrils of blinding light, the energy within them feeding the power at her core as their faces shrivel into pale death. She feasts – and she deserves it, after starving for so long. There’s only one voice raised against the tirade; a deranged, maniacal laughter struggling through the timbre, from a man slumped upon the theatre steps, clutching his bleeding eye socket. As her solo continues, and she drops the lifeless corpses of her family (captors, liars) to the floor, the man struggles to his feet. 

“Vanya,” he cries, which stirs something within her – but there’s no time to wander. She has to concentrate. The show must go on. “You did it, you’re safe now! They can’t hurt you anymore.” 

The soloist tries to block him out – to concentrate all her effort towards containing the raw energy coursing through her, and digesting the light they held; strength and kinesis and rumors and death. She lets it pulse out through the body of her violin, her conduit, and the force shakes the building. Dust filters down from the vaulted ceiling. 

“Vanya,” the man repeats, and again a feeling stirs, some straining echo of love. She doesn’t have time for it. His voice becomes choked, his legs unsteady, and he topples to the ground again. Red trickles from his ears, and his eyes roll back into bloodshot whites. He chokes that word again:  _ Vanya,  _ before he keels over on the stairs. 

The final notes are drawing near – she’s bars away from the end. She’s been practicing this piece for so long – and not just the notes, which she’s been pouring over during her last few days, desperate to calm herself when her heart beat too fast, and her emotions ran too high. She’s been practising this piece for as long as she can remember – ever since her Father left a piece of her severed and rotting in a vault beneath the prison of her childhood. She never did understand the deep, implacable longing she always held within in; numb and dumb and never quite whole. Until now. All the missing fragments of herself are united, and the timid little shell she’s been trapped within these past twenty-five years is lost in the expanse of the rest of her. Stunted, shrivelled, dying little thing, crawling out of the dark, growing into something monstrous. 

She pulls her bow from the string, and resets her position for the final down-bow. Behind the stroke, she rallies every shard of her anger, the blue flame burning through to white in her heart. She powers it with every sound in the air; waves drawn in, leaving the amphitheatre in absolute, maddening silence. It’s like the tide drawing back from the sands, leaving the ocean flat and calm as it builds to a tsunamic wave on the horizon. Before it surges forwards, and blots out the sun. The final note tears at the fibres of her bowstrings, and resonantes with the chords in her throat, drawing them to the surface of her skin in sliced, dark grooves. It ripples through her ribcage, tears her throat raw and pulses in her eardrums. The perfect resolution to her melody rings out to an audience of corpses. Lights down, and the curtain drops. 

The soloist collapses to the stage floor as a beam of pure energy shoots upwards in a surge of white. It crashes through the glass dome above toward the steadfast glow of the moon. Before her eyes flicker shut from exhaustion, she just has time to see the orb crack like the surface of a mirror; deep, fiery red spilling forth between the scores. It crumbles apart into dark rock, and rains down through the sky like confetti. 

The world ends, and the monster smiles. 

…

_ I told you so. _

A boy drags a red wagon across the wasteland, and tries not to listen to his Father’s voice as it plays over and over in his head. Three days ago, he stormed away from the dinner table and tried to prove that he was ready to test the limits of his powers, and travel through time. He’s always been too headstrong, far too sure of himself. He took risks – and usually his sister was the one to remind him to keep his head down, and keep calm. The look in her eyes as he’d left plays his mind now; dark and pleading, a minute shake of the head. He didn’t listen, and now he is trapped at the end of the world.

His powers don’t work anymore. It feels different to all the instances during training when he would push himself to his limit, at his Father’s command. Jumping in such quick succession that his atoms barely had time to arrange themselves into a coherent body before he swept them back up again into the ether. Jarring, dizzying flashes of blue; it left him faint and ragged from exhaustion, legs like jelly and mind displaced, confused. What he feels now is completely different. He isn’t tired, and yet he is completely drained. Clenching his hands into fists and concentrating his mind shrewdly on a sure location in time and space, he feels nothing. A surge of feeble blue at his fingertips, and it fizzles out into the air. Something has been taken from the world. The vast, endless well of energy he used to draw upon when he curled his grip around the edges of reality, has run dry. The spatial clarity with which he once understood the alignment of all things has been scraped away, and the world is hollow. He feels blind. And all the while, in his head, he sees the sneering face of his Father. This is the lesson he was trying to teach him, and he half expects the old man to step out from behind one of the crumbling buildings lining the scorched, cracked roadside, ready to reprimand him with a barked, curt lecture. Just another one of his Father’s elaborate mind games – a test of skill. The boy knows this isn’t true. There will be no punishment to follow this lesson, just a long, slow teaching. Even after three days alone here, he is beginning to accept the truth of his predicament; he will die here just like everything else. 

Unable to perform even the simplest of spatial jumps, he walks resolutely through the streets transformed from their grimy, industrial grandeur into a twisted, sand-strewn waste. He wonders if he’s walked this way before, or perhaps driven by the rusted shells of these very buildings in a black limousine, waving to the crowds lining the sidewalk. 

He has no particular destination in mind. He hopes that this city was the centre of the destruction, and that somewhere else on Earth there are survivors of this calamity. It seems doubtful. On his first night spent here, cowering beneath a caving ceiling, warming himself by the fires so resiliently burning, he studied the sky. The moon was torn to pieces; less than half of the sphere intact, with the rest crumbled away into jagged, black rock. The core of it still glowed faintly with heat, and its usual silver glow was replaced by a dim, blood red, fading away into the night. As a child raised to kill, he has always held a fascination with disaster, and he knows what happens to a planet struck so completely with meteorites or nuclear warheads. A shockwave across the surface of the planet, its front a barrage of flame. Nothing could have survived that. Still, he has to keep trying. If anyone can survive the apocalypse, it’s his family. 

It’s on this third day of aimless wandering that the boy comes upon a street corner he recognises. He reconstructs its image in his mind; a wide boulevard, shoddy apartment complexes lining one side, beige and red-bricked walls reaching up towards the sky. Across the way, a theatre. He once attended an opera there with his siblings. Out of all the buildings he has seen so far, save perhaps the academy itself, the theatre is the most thoroughly decimated. It is nothing but a vast, undulating plain of loose bricks and shards of plaster. In the middle of the dilapidation, there is a vast crater; a perfect circle. Around its circumference, molten metal twists upright, blacked and solidified into glassy stalagmites suffused at jagged angles to the scorched earth. As the building collapsed, it seems to have been obstructed in its path by some invisible, dome-like barrier. Metal and debris has melted and merged into one, and cooled into a permanent fixture. This must be where one of the meteorites struck. 

Among the ruins of the theatre, he spots corpses. He has encountered a great many bodies in his trek through the city. Most of them were charred to a blackened crisp, skin hardened and red-ridged and crusting upon the stone. Others were crushed beneath rubble, mashed to bits and dashed across the dust. Some were in cars, caught in traffic when the rapture came. They sat in a mockery of the morning commute; black skeletons in the framework of vehicles, tires melted into puddles clinging to the road. The corpses in the theatre are different.

It seems as if the audience died where they sat, spending their final moments fixated upon the performance. They were buried beneath the bricks that came down around them, but they’re unburnt. Inspecting their faces, the boy notices streaks of blood dried to crusted lines along their necks, streaming from their ears and noses. Their eyes are black, the skin around them hollowed and worn thin, with the darkness creeping through their pores in patterns like bolts of lightning. He’s never seen anything like it, and as someone who was taught just about every way to kill a man, he is perplexed. 

Among the audience, he finds four bodies grouped close together, nearer to the stage. Unlike the others, their faces are unmarked. From them emanates that same hollow, drained feeling he has been harbouring ever since he arrived in this nightmare. He feels akin to them, like whatever has been taken from him has been carved out of them, too – something beyond life. A terrible thought comes to him – because it’s been nearly seventeen years for the world, of course he wouldn’t recognise them at first glance. That’s when he notices the tattoos, and reality settles heavy and stone-like in his gut. Where else would the Umbrella Academy be but at the source of the destruction? He makes them out; one, two, three, four. He traces the features he remembers in their adult faces, trying to imagine what they would say to him if they knew he was here now. He doesn’t see Ben. 

Seeing his siblings like this makes him feel as if it’s all set in stone; he traveled to the future, and he never came back. That is the course that time has run, and it is irrefutable. If only he could warn them. If only he could have fought by their side like they were trained to, and destroyed the evil their Father always warned them would come. The boy sinks to the ground, and pays no mind to the pain as his knees graze over sharp, broken bricks. Luther is holding a glass eye in his fist; clenched and cold and blood-covered. He takes it, and while polishing it off, examining the artifact of the man the academy had been fighting – who had perhaps caused this apocalypse – a flicker of white catches in his peripheral. He turns to the crater ringed in those tarry, twisted parapets. Tucked within its concave centre is a bundle of white fabric, scraped black and brown with dirt and ash. 

Getting to his feet, the boy allows his curiosity to replace the grief beginning to crush him. He pushes it aside, pockets the glass eye, and approaches the crater. He ducks through the cracks in the black, glacial dome, dragging his wagon across the soil. It’s barren and hard-packed where the heat has glazed its surface. The crater dips slightly downhill towards the centre, and where he would have expected to see a hunk of blackened moonrock, he sees what he now recognises as a figure. A person. From above, ash filters down soft and light like snowflakes, settling white upon the dark soil. It gives the impression of some vast, depressing snow globe. 

Approaching the figure, he makes out long, dark hair, flecked with white grains of ash. A soft hum permeates the air, low so as to lurk at the edge of his perception, at frequencies just too low and too high, ringing incessantly in a deep thrum, and a faint glitter. He feels strange as he nears the source of the noise; cavitous, like something is being siphoned from him, like blood drawn from his veins, making him feel faint and dizzy. Making him see spots of white. 

But the person – a woman, he realises – is breathing. Hope flares hot in his chest as he sinks to his knees at her side, trying to roll her over and see if she’s injured. Before he can do so, she stirs, and slowly, a head emerges from within the tangled dregs of white. From beneath curtains of long, dark hair, a pale face peers out. 

“Hello?” he says, edging back. He doesn’t want to startle her. 

The woman raises a pale, trembling hand and parts the hair from her face. As she opens her eyes, there’s a steely glint, a flash of pale blue. It’s gone before the boy can be sure it wasn’t just a trick of the light. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, reaching out a hand. She’s wearing a tattered, oversized white suit jacket over a white shirt and tie. 

She shrinks back, shoulders hunching inwards. Her eyes – a rich, dark brown – gaze up at the grey, ashen sky, feeble sunlight struggling through the haze. Her breathing is fast and choked as she stammers something incoherent. “W-where, I – I can’t,” her words devolve into breathless murmurs. Around him, the boy feels that sensation growing stronger; blood drawn from his veins. He feels exhausted. “My head,” she mumbles, and clasps her hands to her ears. The woman squeezes her eyes shut and curls up, rocking back and forth and muttering noiselessly. The boy notices something tucked next to her in the dirt; a white violin – and suddenly a jolt of recognition passes through him. He looks back at the woman incredulously – but it can’t be her, she can’t possibly have survived all this. Again, he reaches out a hand to her shoulder tentatively. As he touches her, the faintness within him reaches a disorienting peak. His chest feels constricted, like the air is being sucked from his lungs, and the white clouding his vision is more than falling ash. She stops rocking and raises her head, gazing up at him with those deeply familiar dark eyes. And again he replays the scene in his mind; those very same eyes, staring from beneath a dark, hanging fringe, begging him silently to stay calm. 

“Vanya?” he whispers. 

“No – no, I’m not. I can’t –” she mumbles, and her words turn into a sob. She hangs her head again, sinking her neck down between her legs where they’re tucked towards her chest. The boy pulls his hand away, giving her space, and giving himself time to piece this all together. The solution to all of this is right in front of him, and in a way, it makes awful, ironic sense. The power that is permeating the air is clearly coming from her, and the crater around her confirmed it. A great blast had torn across the earth, with her at the centre, the source. The molten metal ringing the edge of the crater, as if the rubble had been thrown down and dashed against a force-field, and cooled into solidity around her. It made sense, but it was impossible – Vanya doesn’t have any powers, that is the very fact that drenched her life in tragedy and loneliness. It was the reason she was always shunned, and pushed away, and kept secret from the world. 

“Vanya,” he tries again, clearer this time. “It’s me. It’s –”

“Five,” she murmurs, and when he looks up she is staring at him, pain knotted through her features. 

“You remember,” he says, “I-I just got here a few days ago and – and I can’t leave, my powers don’t work here. The academy’s destroyed, I think everyone’s... “ he stops talking, because she looks disorientated, as if she can’t understand him. He slows down. “Vanya, what happened?” 

It takes a moment for his words to sink in. He watches her swallow, shake her head, and again bury her face in her hands. “I don’t know, I can’t –”

“It’s okay,” he says gently, and already the tightness in his chest is beginning to relinquish. “We should get out of here.” 

She nods, and he smiles at her. He gets to his feet and brushes the ash from his blazer. Vanya stays on the ground a moment longer, glazing out at the glacial towers, the craterous earth, and the fiery rubble beyond. Five bends down and grips one of her arms, onto which she clings, pulling herself to her unsteady feet. 

“My ears… they’re ringing, I can’t – everything’s muffled,” she whispers hoarsely. She takes a step forward and immediately stumbles. Five catches her by the arm and gently pulls it over his shoulder, keeping her steady. They’re almost the same height, despite all the time that’s passed for her. It’s like she hasn’t grown at all in seventeen years. Acknowledging the number makes it feel real, and so he pushes the reality of it away. It’s only been three days. He can still fix this. 

It’s clear to him that he won't be getting any answers out of her yet. The explosion likely burst her eardrums – she’s probably starving and exhausted and confused. Suddenly, his sister tenses up beside him, and before he can stop her she rips herself out of his grasp and runs over the threshold of the blackened crater, over onto the ruined mass of the theatre. 

“Vanya!” he calls, dropping the handle of his wagon to the earth and dashing after her. 

“No, oh no, no, no,” she mutters, and with a jolt Five realises that she’s recognised the corpses in the rubble as well. She throws herself to the ground beside Klaus – who over the years seems to have only grown taller and thinner, dressed head-to-toe in black frills and leather, his eyeliner smudged around pale, dead eyes. The umbrella tattoo on his wrist is thrust out into the open air. “Klaus,” Vanya sobs, gripping him by the shoulder where he lies half buried beneath a pile of bricks. “Klaus, please, oh god,” she continues, her whispers fading into incoherency again. 

“Vanya,” he calls again, “they’re all –” he’s cut off by yet another anguished sob. 

“Allison!” 

Five looks on in resigned sadness as Vanya scrambles over the ruins, half crawling, towards her sister. When they were children, Vanya was always scared of Allison, who so often teased her, policing all their sibling’s games. This would be impossible to tell now, as Vanya cries beside her sister’s corpse. The awful cycle repeats for Diego, and then Luther, during which Five can only stand and watch, and allow her to reach the terrible truth on her own. 

She kneels beside Luther, with her hands pressing down upon his massive shoulder. Her cries are ragged, deranged, slowly softening into choked, quiet sobs. He can hear her moaning low in her throat; “no, no, no.” 

Slowly, he approaches her from behind. “Vanya,” he says gently, reaching out towards her – at which her voice dithers away into silence, and her shoulders tense into a harsh, rigid line. “They’re gone, I’m sorry – I don’t know how it happened, but –” but he has his suspicions, growing to an irrefutable hunch as the air around him shimmers as if in a gaseous haze, and that imperceptible resonance grows into an audible, pitchy whine. Wind chimes, whistling through the ash as it collects into tendrils of white, swirling around him. His chest constricts, and grows cold. His eyes sting, and from the building sound, his ears begin to throb. A soft blue glow emanates from his sister’s fingertips, and unlike Five’s own attempts at conjuring his abilities, her’s doesn’t fade out into the air. She draws energy from the well of the planet, and from him. Five is frozen where he stands, reaching out, and as his fingers brush against her shoulder she lets out an unrestrained, piercing cry. It’s elevated beyond the volume of voice alone, and the sound ripples deafening through the air. He’s pushed backwards by a surge of blue, a punch to his gut that sends him flying. Before his head thuds against the bricks beneath, he catches a glimpse of her figure rising into the air, glowing, her dark hair flying in wild, dark curls. He hears a crack as his head connects with stone, and his vision goes black. 

…

The monster is suspended in the sky, hung like a marionette. From her centre, wave after wave of blue energy crackles and folds, pulsating outwards to the beat of her heart. And as it was in the dark, the sound is deafening; the blood in her ears surging river-rapid in the absence of sense. She feels as if she is trapped once again in the vault, the foam-spiked walls absorbing every precious pulse of sound, starving her out – and she drowns in the silence. Her eyes are wedged wide, blaring like beacons. The soundwaves she pushes out across the surface of the ruined earth map it all within her mind, the echoes coating every molecule. There’s not a single voice out there, not a single, straining heartbeat. All she senses is the crackle of flames, the slow, tumbling degradation of buildings and mountains and the quiet, incessant rolling of the ocean. She feels tears sting her eyes, and evaporate away in the heat. 

Slowly, she sinks to the ground, quelling her heartbeat as it resonates; white, and back down to a steady, throbbing blue. She walks, and in her path the buildings bend, crumbling brick by clinging brick. The road cracks apart, spilling forth wet, dark soil, and the skeletons of cars are crushed flat atop their puddled rubber tires. 

The monster walks home, across a city transformed by her anger. Within her, the stolen energy of the world festers, bubbling away in her stomach as it’s digested. And the blue light held within each one of her siblings, siphoned from them, feeds the glowing golden particles at her core, and keeps them firefly-bright. 

Through the haze, she struggles to piece together the events that led her here. She was a child, trapped in the dark and left to die – she was an adult, living all her years a dull, accepted pain, – and these two parts were severed, then hastily fused into one, incongruent being. She isn’t sure which one she is now; one or both or neither. She remembers a boy pulling her to her feet, calling her name – but he isn’t real. Just an echo of her childhood, coming to wake her up to the world she created for herself. 

…

When the boy wakes up, his head is pounding. His arms feel thin and ragged, flimsy as liquid. He reaches a trembling hand to the back of his head, and his fingers come away red from a patch of dampness in his dark hair. Slowly, his memories return to him – and as when waking up from a pleasant dream only to have harsh reality dawn upon him, he finds himself wishing for the ignorance of those first few conscious moments. He can see the spot from which Vanya rose up into the air, because the shockwave she loosed has pushed the bricks clean away from the soil beneath. His siblings’ bodies are scattered, strewn across the landscape like discarded ragdolls. He feels bile rising up his throat. Scrambling to his feet, he limps back to where his wagon sits, back towards the crater where he found Vanya. He spits onto the ashen earth, and it comes out dark and ruddy with blood. 

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to him what happened to the world, despite its impossibility. Vanya caused the apocalypse – and yet, she seemed so distraught upon finding the bodies of their siblings. It was Vanya that drained the world of the power he relied upon – drained it from all of them and expelled it in some devastating blast. He wonders if he was drawn here by that force, pulling him through time as he offered his energy up so willingly.

Staring out at the street he walked down earlier, he traces Vanya’s path of destruction. A great, gaping crack runs down the centre of the bitumen, and on all sides the buildings sag downwards towards the road, drawn in by her power and crumbling into further ruin. From the crater, he takes her violin, the wood bleached to a shade of blinding white. He tucks it away in his wagon of piecemeal supplies, and follows Vanya’s destructive wake. Even blind, he would have been able to do so; the sound she left behind rings faintly through the cracks in the stone, and the molecules in the air. All he has to do is follow the drowning sensation in his chest, like the sound of her voice, calling out. 

…

He finds her where he knew he would. The academy – though it’s now nothing but a snapped, wrought-iron gate and a set of chipped stone stairs. She’s standing in the centre of the ruins, where stone and brick lay buried under ash and plaster-dust, and splinters of wood from those meticulously polished floors. Among the waste, he can see the arms of the entrance hall’s vast chandelier, its crystals cracked and glittering in the flamelight. The edges of her form waver; white and irregular, like static crackling electric in the air. Beneath her, the ground shudders, and the wind is alight with a glittering chime. 

She turns around before he can muster the courage to approach. Her skin is deathly-pale, marbled through with dark veins and bruise-blue. Her coat has been abandoned – and it was torn to muddied shreds anyhow. Her white tie hangs loose around her neck, swaying with uncanny periodicity in the conjured breeze. The boy steps forwards, trying not to show his fear. He’s good at that; masking the crippling anxiety in his gut, tossing it aside with a proud smirk and a quip. None come to mind now. 

He notices her eyes; pale blue with beady, dark pupils burning coldly in the centre – but there’s no mistaking her. “Number Five,” she says, and her thin lips curl into the slightest of smiles. Her voice sounds louder than it should, given the distance between them. The wind seems to carry it forward, and it echoes; louder, softer, higher, lower. The sound makes him shiver. 

Despite his fear, he starts up the academy steps. “Yes,” he calls, “it’s me. Vanya, what’s going on?” He needs to know, because then he might be able to stop it; go back, fix her. 

“I –” she falters. There’s a flickering glow, a faded blue light in the centre of her chest. “I remember. I was playing in a show. There was this music,” and the humming in the air swells, like microphone interference, stinging his ears. “– and they tried to stop it. I mean, do they know how hard it is to make it to first chair?” a hint of anger creeps into her voice. Five walks slowly onwards, trying to reach her. 

“I’ve never gotten a solo in my life, and they tried to stop me,” she rolls her head back and glares up at the sky. There are dark grooves sliced into her neck, like strings, formed from the marbling of her flesh. “You know what they’re like, Five,” she looks down at him again, “you always understood – and then Leonard tried to stop them… Leonard,” her voice softens to a whisper. “But then he wouldn’t be quiet either and they  _ had _ to be quiet, and sit down and just watch, just  _ listen _ , just –” she shudders. Her fists, clenched tightly at her sides, flare bright. The boy walks closer; slowly, unthreatening. Terrified. There are echoes of the girl he knew within her, but everything is twisted in some grotesque mimicry of the way she used to speak, and share her guarded secrets. 

“They locked me up,” her eyes blaze wide and menacing, the muscles in her neck tensed and straining beneath her pallid skin. Her voice is tense too; thin, the words rapid and strung together. She pushes them out in one tight, manic breath. “They put me in the same place Dad used to hide me when the rest of you were playing, and I was bad,” she breathes, and still her voice sounds far too loud, echoing from ear to ear; back and forth like a pendulum. She smirks; “I wouldn’t eat my oatmeal and I broke his stupid monocle. I threw her down the stairs and snapped her neck” She tilts her head to one side, as if in curiosity, “ Did you know the pills were poison, Number Five? Because Pogo did – I pinned him up on the mantle under Dad’s portrait – you remember the one,” the smirk grows into a smile, and she holds it in place for a terrible moment before her lips begin to quiver, and she presses her eyes shut. “They found out about my powers and they locked me up. You were always right about them, Five, they always listen to Dad, always do whatever he tells them, even after he’s dead and gone” she sounds dejected, sadness edging into her tone. “And they had all this  _ energy, _ ” she whispers, though the sound cuts through his head razor-sharp. “It was just sitting there and they weren’t using it, and I  _ needed _ it.” She sighs; “it sounded so beautiful.” 

“Vanya,” he says, trying to hide the trembling in his voice. “You need to calm down.” She always used to do that for him; quell his anger when the others riled him up, and he twisted his face into a petulant scowl. She was always the calm one, the voice of reason. Timid and quiet and docile, despite the injustice she faced everyday. But, as he now realises, that was never her nature, it was done to her, by their Father. He kept her sedated because he couldn’t control her. He always did tell them to stay away from Vanya – that she wasn’t worth their time. Not ordinary, but dangerous. Again, that sneering voice barks its reprimand;  _ I told you so.  _ “Vanya, please.”

“No – no, they keep calling me that. Why do they keep calling me that?” Her eyes are closed, and she presses her hands over her ears. 

“Please,” he cries, and already the jaded power in the air is beginning to fade away, the pale glow of her skin returning to warmth. “I can help you.”

“No, no you’re not here,” she mutters, shaking her head. Her voice is almost normal. “You ran away and you never came back and you left me here, and I’m going crazy.” Vanya sinks to the floor, kneeling upon the cracked slabs of marble and broken shards of furniture that was once their home. 

“I promise,” he crouches down beside her, placing a cautious hand on her hunched back, “I’m here.” 

“I – I left the lights on every night,” she murmurs, head hung low, her dark hair obscuring her face. It reminds him of the way she would sulk when she was younger – days ago for him, and decades for her – with her bangs hung low over tearful eyes. “I made those sandwiches you always liked.”

“Peanut butter and marshmallow,” he whispers under his breath. It begins to dawn on him just how unforgiving time is; the true depths of the freezing waters.  _ I told you so.  _

If he really has been missing all those years, it means he will never escape this place. If he’s only trapped here because of what happened to Vanya – and he  _ knows  _ that if he stayed he could have helped her, fixed her, kept her calm like she always did for him – then his very first stint through time has landed him in a paradoxical loop. It’s impossible to tell which is the catalyst; his foolish, petulant, self-absorbed spat with his father leading him to jump into the future without a thought, or the pull of Vanya’s power, dragging him through the ether to bleed his essence dry. Both of them, so desperate to escape from beneath their Father’s oppressive rule, have tangled themselves inescapably in the fate of the other. They’ve tied each other in temporal knots, because he will always run, and she will always break. 

“I didn’t mean to leave you,” he says. 

She looks up from beneath the curtains of her hair, and when she opens her eyes they’re back to their warm, comforting brown. 

“I only just got here,” he blinks, and to his surprise, tears fall. He sniffs and brushes them hurriedly away. “I jumped through time and I ended up here, and Dad was right, I wasn’t ready.”

“No,” she’s shaking her head, and brings up a hand to touch his cheek. He lets the tears fall. There’s no one around to watch; no Luther or Diego to tease him with their tough-guy schtick. No one for which to pretend, and play the hero. No one in the world but the two of them. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. I was just so angry, and I thought I could do it. Now I’m stuck here and my powers don’t even work –” he takes a short, hitched breath. It all comes bubbling to the surface; the grief and hopelessness he’s been harbouring these past few days, the anger at himself, his loneliness – because she was always the only one he ever told. She was his sole confidant. 

“You’re really here,” her lips quiver up into a weak, wan smile. She looks at him for a moment – and the way she searches his features, as if struggling to recall a half-buried memory, breaks his heart. Vanya pulls him into a hug, and despite his general aversion to the act, he allows himself to melt into it, burying his face in her shoulder and pressing his eyes shut. After a few moments, that droning hum starts up again, and the dust at their feet is kicked up into eddies of swirling particles. Her chin is hooked over his shoulder, and he hears her laughing. Five feels that old pain reemerge in his chest, blossoming out to a full-body numbness. He looks up, tears smudged wet upon his cheeks. The bricks and slabs of stone drift up into the air, suspended mutely around them both in a spiralling pattern, reaching upwards. 

Gently, he pulls away from her, gazing up at the sky. He stands, and she copies him. As she stares out at the ruins surrounding, she seems to take the scene in anew. Her eyes widen in shock, and in a sudden surge of noise, the floating fragments of the academy shoot outwards and clatter back to the rubble beneath. 

“Vanya,” he broaches, cautious “what happened?” 

“I,” she mutters, her breath quickening in panic once more. “I didn’t – oh god,” she sobs. Her dark eyes glint a stinging, ethereal shade of blue, the colour draining from her cheeks as blackness spreads around her eyes. “No, not again, I can’t –” she pushes her hands over her ears. 

“Hey,” he grips her by the shoulders. An electric jolt shoots through his palms, and through his chest. For a brief moment, he feels the old comfort of the power he once held within him; the acute, agile awareness of the molecules around him, down to their most intricate structures. He can see the paths between them, how to command them. He can see time laid out in all its twists and turns, and the hopeless knot in which he’s tied himself. The wrongness of it makes his skin crawl. Time isn’t supposed to bend in such a way, an infinite loop. “You’re okay,” he whispers to her, “calm down, you’re okay.” 

“I didn’t mean to hurt them,” she cries, and he feels the power leave her, the air return to its stagnant, ash-choked state. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I can’t control it, I don’t know how. I didn’t mean to.” Her turn to bury her face into him. She sobs into the collar of his blazer, and he pulls her close, breathing a sigh of relief as the ringing in his ears fades away. 

“I know,” he assures her, “I know you didn’t.” 

Despite the echo of his power he can feel as he holds her, it’s separate from him. It has passed, from him to her, and so has all the energy of the world; every voice, contained within her. The power she had always wanted is hers, because she sapped it all away, and spun it into song. He’s trapped here, because she can’t stop what she has already set in motion, the energy of the entire world poised behind her intent to draw away every dreg that existed within every one of her siblings, spun from the same, golden source. He can feel how unstable she is; a second away from breaking, all that rage and noise barely held beneath the surface of her skin. As soon as it emerges, he’ll be in danger again. The drive within her to consume is endless, and he will forever be a source. 

…

The monster holds the boy close. She woke something up when she let her siblings drop, drained and lifeless to the floor. It’s too much for her to contain; the terrible silence of the world, because all its voices are inside her head. All their golden light is her’s now, and to relinquish it would be to die – because she’s volatile, running through their energy like an old, broken engine. She’s going mad, and so she clings to the only sane thing that still exists within the hell she’s made. Her sole confidant. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for there being no real resolution to this. Maybe the commission pick them both up as agents lol  
> (but for real I am so close to writing that AU, too many stories to write first aahhh)


End file.
